In the 1940s, boys at English public schools were still
constantly reminded by their middle class school masters not to
give their athletic coaches (the "professionals" on
staff) the prefix "Mr." They were to be addressed and
referred to simply by their surname, such as Barker, just as one
would address servants. Thus did the schoolmaster, wrapping
himself in the gentility conferred by a BA, cling to his
precarious perch on the lowest rung of the social hierarchy.
Doubtless the same schoolmasters would have been punctilious in
their use of "Esq.," a title used indiscriminately
after World War II in order not to cause offence, but which
became so common as a result that it slowly but surely began
replacing "Mr" all round. It lingers on in the USA
among lawyers, even lady lawyers.

Jane Austen would not have needed a book like this to help her
address her letters. As the great, great niece of a Duke; the
great niece of the Master of Balliol College, Oxford; the
daughter of a parson; the cousin of a French countess; and the
sister of two admirals, Austen had the aristocracy, academia, the
Church, and the defence forces down pat. She slipped a bit when
it came to Royalty, but then, they were not family.

Many American readers of Austen are confused when they see
that some titles involve the use of first names and others are
followed by surnames: what distinguished Lady Dalrymple from Lady
Catherine? Austen knew exactly how to refer to the dowager and
the daughter of a viscount (Lady Dalrymple and Miss Carteret, Persuasion)
on the one hand, and to the widow of a baronet, who, though she
had married down, had, as the daughter of an earl, retained her
own title of Lady and her own forename (Lady Catherine De Bourgh.
Pride and Prejudice.) As Titles and Forms of Address
explains, she would also have retained the same name had she
married the younger son of an earl, because she would have
outranked him. The volume from A& C Black is useful for
clarifying these complexities.

In a sense, Jane Austen's world was fairly uncomplicated; she
knew her way around the prescribed codes of her society. There
were only a handful or so of "letters after the name."
There were, for example, only four orders of chivalry (compared
with the 12 contemporary orders, each with multiple divisions).
The present volume lists 559 abbreviations or "letters after
the name" (including, interestingly HM, but omitting HRH).
Whereas Sir William Elliot prized his Great Book for what it
could tell him about his own and other people's antecedents, the
value of Titles and Forms of Address lies in enabling us
both to wend our way through today's labyrinth, not so much of
the aristocracy (whose forms are pretty much frozen) but of the
newer social and professional hierarchies. To those readers,
however, who find Austen's world sufficiently confusing, this
book may prove useful.

All societies create hierarchies, and forms of address. Like
etiquette and protocol, they are designed--contrary to popular
belief--to make life simpler, not more complex, by laying out who
goes first and how to behave in a given situation. Protocol lets
each one know where one stands, literally. When protocol is
silent, uncertainty and discomfort ensues, as when HRH The Prince
of Wales went to Paris to collect the body of his former wife,
Diana, Princess of Wales, and no one had thought to indicate on
the programme whether he or the President of France should exit
the hospital first. Two courteous men each begging to go behind
the other resulted in an unseemly shuffle. (Titles and Forms
of Address is silent on the style of the divorced wife of the
heir to the throne, or on the divorced and remarried daughter of
the monarch.)

Few of us now need to know how to address the remarried former
wives of eldest sons of marquesses, or the dreadful mistakes that
can occur in the case of the wives of the younger sons of
dukes and marquesses, but the rise of the professional woman, who
is honoured in her own right, is still a novelty.

One real shortcoming of this book is the absence of a table of
precedence. Without it, we shall not be able to write to a Bishop
(male or female) married to a Lord Justice of Appeal (male or
female) and know whose name comes first, unless we follow Titles
and Forms of Address usage and always put the husband first.
Though presumably even this volume would not ask us to address an
envelope to: "Captain Timothy Laurence MVO RN and HRH The
Princess Royal."

An adept of Titles and Farms of Address will find much
to study in the life of a great Englishwoman, Violet Bonham
Carter (d. 1969). Born Miss Violet Asquith(1887), she became Mrs
Maurice Bonham Carter on marriage (1915), Lady Bonham Carter when
her husband was knighted (1916), Lady Violet Bonham Carter when
her father was created an earl (1925), and Baroness Asquith of
Yarnbury when she was made a Life Peer (1964) in her own right.

Ultimately, Titles and Forms of Address can help us
understand how Austen uses titles and precedence to help portray
her characters. Just as Lady Catherine has slipped a rung or two
in marriage, so Sir William Elliot, that unmitigated snob, is
placed so brilliantly by Austen in that "twilit region
between the nobility and the gentry" (D.W. Harding, in his
introduction to Persuasion, Penguin 1965). A baronet is a
hereditary knight; he holds a title, but is not a member of the
House of Lords. As Austen shows, it is always the socially
precarious who cling officiously to precedence, such as Lydia in Pride
and Prejudice, and Mary Musgrove in Persuasion, both
obsessed with outranking their older unmarried sisters and
setting themselves up as arbiters of form.

Caroline Cracroft, a graduate of the Sorbonne and Somerville
College, Oxford, where she read Modern History, is an
Englishwoman who has lived in the United States for the last 30
years. She works at the British Consulate in Chicago.